Make FFXIV more like FFXI and less like WoW

[Hyrist]

-snip-

Now think of those wonderfully humongous zones with the teleport capabilities FFXIV has available and you've got a winning combination

FFXI's zones are dull in comparison to FFXIV's zones. Ronfarue, Saruta, etc. Were all incredible looking back in 03'. But go back to them. Look now. They're dull. They don't have much in the terms of life to them, and look a lot like FFXIV's 1.0 version zones if you made them smaller and took out the copy-pasta. Pretty, but quite empty.

Also, if you gave FFXI's players FFXIV's run-speed, you'd burn through those zones rather fast too. Ease of transport does not make theses zones less vibrant or amazing - your impatience does. Take the time an LOOK. FFXI forced you to look because it took forever to get anywhere of note. FFXIV is full of places of note and it's difficult to take it all in unless you stop yourself to just see it.

I actually want to do a video series where it takes the time to just show off these places to people, because we walk past it all so easily.

Go on, talk a walk; soak it in. The zones are so much more than what you give them credit for. Only thing I'll agree with you is the reduced sense of danger in them. And honestly, that's fine by me, if you run in the wrong direction, you still can get yourself killed.

Yoshi-P disagrees with you. His assessment of why XIV 1.0 did so poorly (in large part) is because one of Tanaka and co's main goals was to make XIV as unlike XI as possible and ended up with "not much of anything".

They obsessively tried to steer XIV away from XI, and it blew up in their face.

You're paraphrasing incorrectly. What Yoshi was citing was that FFXI focused on being a good game for its timeframe and age, it played off of the refrences of games recently before it and did so in a Final Fantasy Style.

FFXIV used FFXI as pretty much its ONLY Groundwork, and pushed itself too far to be unique from FFXI without any outside inspiration to fill the gap. What was left was a game with more flaws than FFXI had and little in terms of redeeming value, because 'we could just fix it later! We're Final Fantasy!' was the hubris at the time.

It had as much to do with being ignorant of the world around them as it was pushing so far as way from FFXI that it lost what it meant to be a Final Fantasy game.